Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Brazilian health technology assessment processes based on public reports from the National Committee for Health Technology Incorporation (CONITEC).
Methods: This descriptive study analyzed CONITEC's official reports on Brazil available on its website between 2018 and 2021 that aimed to propose recommendations for technologies to be incorporated into its public healthcare system. We used descriptive statistics covering the number of technologies and number of reports about drugs per year, objective, type of technology, demanding sector, and outcome before 2018 to 2019 and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2021). Furthermore, we used logistic regression to explore any association between the final decision labeled as "incorporated" and the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Results: A total of 278 reports were analyzed. Approximately 85% (136 of 278), 79% (220 of 278), and 45% of the reports (125 of 278) were about drugs, for incorporation, and requested by the government, respectively. Moreover, 74 of 130 (57%) and 56 of 148 decisions (38%) were "incorporated" before and during the pandemic, respectively. No significant association was noted between incorporated decisions and the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic for all technologies (odds ratio 1.43; 95% CI 0.84-2.46; P = .192) and for drugs (odds ratio 1.43; 95% confidence interval 0.81-2.53; P = .223) while adjusting for the type of technology and demandant.
Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic has brought many challenges, but it does not seem to have had a significant impact on the health technology assessment approval decisions of CONITEC in Brazil.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.vhri.2023.04.002 | DOI Listing |
In the context of Chinese clinical texts, this paper aims to propose a deep learning algorithm based on Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) to identify privacy information and to verify the feasibility of our method for privacy protection in the Chinese clinical context. We collected and double-annotated 33,017 discharge summaries from 151 medical institutions on a municipal regional health information platform, developed a BERT-based Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Model (BiLSTM) and Conditional Random Field (CRF) model, and tested the performance of privacy identification on the dataset. To explore the performance of different substructures of the neural network, we created five additional baseline models and evaluated the impact of different models on performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSyst Biol Reprod Med
December 2025
Department of Biosciences and Technology for Food, Agriculture and Environment, University of Teramo, Teramo, Italy.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have acquired an increased recognition to unravel the complex molecular mechanisms underlying Diminished Ovarian Reserve (DOR), one of the main responsible for infertility. To investigate the impact of miRNA profiles in granulosa cells and follicular fluid, crucial players in follicle development, this study employed a computational network theory approach to reconstruct potential pathways regulated by miRNAs in granulosa cells and follicular fluid of women suffering from DOR. Available data from published research were collected to create the FGC_MiRNome_MC, a representation of miRNA target genes and their interactions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Biosci (Landmark Ed)
January 2025
Division of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Education "Siberian State Medical University" of the Ministry of Health of Russia, 634050 Tomsk, Russia.
Background: Over the past five years, the pregnancy rate in assisted reproductive technology (ART) programs in Russia has remained relatively stable. The aim of this study was to assess the distribution of monocyte and macrophage subsets in the blood and follicular fluid of infertile women undergoing assisted reproductive technology.
Methods: The study involved 45 women with a mean age of 35 ± 4.
Front Biosci (Landmark Ed)
January 2025
Division of Molecular Psychiatry, Center of Mental Health, University of Hospital Würzburg, 97080 Würzburg, Germany.
Background: The inheritance of the short allele, encoding the serotonin transporter (SERT) in humans, increases susceptibility to neuropsychiatric and metabolic disorders, with aging and female sex further exacerbating these conditions. Both central and peripheral mechanisms of the compromised serotonin (5-HT) system play crucial roles in this context. Previous studies on SERT-deficient (Sert) mice, which model human SERT deficiency, have demonstrated emotional and metabolic disturbances, exacerbated by exposure to a high-fat Western diet (WD).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Biosci (Landmark Ed)
January 2025
Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, Binzhou Medical University Hospital, 256603 Binzhou, Shandong, China.
Background: Cellular vacuolization is a commonly observed phenomenon under physiological and pathological conditions. However, the mechanisms underlying vacuole formation remain largely unresolved.
Methods: LysoTracker Deep Red probes and Enhanced Green Fluorescent Protein-tagged light chain 3B (LC3B) plasmids were employed to differentiate the types of massive vacuoles.
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